The latest SimCity's beauty is in the details

The first thing that an
old-school SimCity fan is likely to notice about
the series' upcoming revamp, due on PCs in February 2013, is the
level of detail. This includes graphical detail for sure; cities
are finally rendered in full 3D, and you can twist, pan, and zoom
the view to your heart's content. The graphics system uses
tilt-shift effects and saturated colours to make it seem like
you're viewing a tiny, living model world, an impression that is
only enhanced by the satisfying thunk and cloud of dust that comes
from placing buildings and objects.

But it's the level of detail in the simulation that's really
stunning. While the SimCity franchise has always
done a good job of covering macro-level trends in the life of your
city, the new SimCity lets you get incredibly
specific about your citizens. When you set up a residential zone
next to a curvy cul-de-sac, for instance, you can actually see the
"for sale" signs on the individual houses, and watch the moving
vans filling in the vacancies.

Each of those residential families is fully simulated, to the
point where you can follow them to their jobs or shopping trips as
the days progress. The detail extends to other systems, too: you
can actually see your coal piles dwindle as each individual truck
picks up the raw fuel and delivers it to a smog-spewing power
plant, or watch the cops in a shootout with a distinct criminal.
It's a bit mesmerising.

As far as tracking the larger, macro-level systems in your
city, SimCity exposes information in distinct
viewable layers, which strip all the extraneous stuff away and
"expose the brains to the players" at a glance, as the developers
put it. When you place a fire station or a sewage plant, for
instance, the game briefly hides all the detritus of the city to
show you a live, colour-coded circle representing the effective
coverage for the new installation. You can then upgrade these
buildings after placement with decorative and functional additions,
using a snap-on system based on the editor Maxis created
for Spore.

The micro- and macro-level details combine to quickly give
players a robust idea of how SimCity's interconnected
systems play off of each other. Protesting workers in front of a
factory, for instance, will tell you point-blank (with a click)
that they quit because the factory isn't getting any power. You'll
probably notice that those listless, unemployed residents will turn
to crime, both by the graffiti that quickly appears on the sides of
buildings and by the appearance of individual criminals, such as an
arsonist that sets a window-exploding fire in a skyscraper. When
things are working, though, the supply trucks and commuter traffic
will tell you just as well as the layered view of things like
connected power and water systems.

Annoying neighbours for fun and profit
SimCity's persistent, asynchronous multiplayer is focused on joint
goals-major projects that can help different nearby cities in
different ways. In the demo, this took the form of a new
international airport that was being built on the empty land in
between three very different cities.

The heavily industrial city to the northwest needs such an
airport to provide additional shipping and freight opportunities,
while the tourism-focused city to the northeast wants to be able to
bring in more fans for a major sporting event at a new stadium
(this timed event added a bit of urgency to the airport's
completion as well). The newly created, residential-heavy city to
the south, meanwhile, mainly saw the airport as a source of new
jobs.

A major, multicity project like this requires a lot of varied
resources, making them ideal for cooperation between multiple
cities. That industrial city, for instance, is perfectly set up to
create a plant that can produce the metallic alloys the airport
requires, while the southern city with a surfeit of unemployed
people can contribute the raw manpower needed to construct the
terminals.

Cities in the new SimCity can share resources
in other ways as well. It's relatively easy for a darkened city to
connect up to a thriving power grid from the industrial metropolis
next door, though the power-heavy city needs to grant permission
for this kind of connection first (and it's not exactly clear
what's in it for them, other than the joy of power altruism).

Connecting cities by road can also help automatically balance
some deficiencies via the magic of the commute. In the demo, for
instance, connecting a road from the new city to the town with a
lot of empty storefronts led to an immediate traffic jam of cars
eager to flood in for work opportunities. In short, if you want
your city to be a success, you're going to have to make it an
attractive place to live and work compared to its surroundings.

Connecting different cities isn't always a positive, though.
Nearby towns can also share negative externalities like pollution
or crime. In the E3 demo, a criminal in a flashy red car was seen
driving in from a largely lawless section of the industrial town to
rob a bank in the affluent part of the tourist-heavy city, zooming
right by a police station as he did.

With a required Internet connection to play, some might be
worried that SimCity will run into Diablo III style server problems at launch. The
developers are adamant that they'll be putting backstops in place
to prevent those kind of day one issues, but said that if it
becomes a problem they could briefly allow people to play offline
while things get fixed. That said, the game is designed to be
played in that persistent, multiplayer world, so players won't be
able to gleefully destroy a city and then go back to an earlier
save file as if nothing ever happened, for instance.